News release

HP Announces Largest Expansion of StorageWorks Portfolio in Company History

Investments, innovation and alliances address customers' key storage challenges

In the most significant expansion of its storage portfolio in company history, HP today unveiled numerous new products and services that address customers' most pressing storage challenges and extend the company's share of the global storage market, estimated at more than $63 billion according to IDC.⁽¹⁾

Announced at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference, the new and enhanced offerings are the result of investments, innovations and alliances across an HP StorageWorks portfolio designed to help customers put their information to work.

The deep integration across HP's entire storage portfolio results in streamlined customer IT environments by leveraging HP's leadership in servers, management software and services - bringing businesses one step closer to becoming Adaptive Enterprises able to synchronize business and IT to capitalize on change.

"Customers are looking for storage solutions to simplify their storage environments, increase their agility and address the significant growth of data," said John McArthur, group vice president and general manager, Information Infrastructure, IDC. "With today's announcement, HP is focused on increasing both its visibility and competitiveness across a broad portfolio of offerings."

Highlights of today's announcement include:

• HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) Clustered Gateway - HP is raising the bar on the high-end network-attached storage (NAS) market with an entry at 50 percent or more savings over comparable offerings from NetApp and EMC;



• HP StorageWorks EFS WAN Accelerator - speeds up branch office applications access over the wide-area network (WAN) by up to 100x;



• HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System - dramatically improves backup and recovery performance;



• HP StorageWorks 4000, 6000 and 8000 Enterprise Virtual Arrays - major enhancement and expansion of EVA family maintains industry's lowest disk array total cost of ownership;



• HP StorageWorks Enterprise Modular Library E-series - expands HP's enterprise library family and ideal pairing with EVA;



• Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) services - leverage HP's deep knowledge of business, technical and industry requirements;



• Fast Recovery Solutions - enables recovery of Microsoft® Exchange databases in minutes instead of hours.

"Every day, our customers tell us that they need to improve business continuity, consolidate storage and servers, comply with more regulations, simplify storage management and continue building an infrastructure that can adapt to change," said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, HP. "Today's announcement is evidence that we are hitting on every facet of our customers' storage challenges with investments across our broad portfolio to help them put their information to work."

Game-changing innovation

The new HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) Clustered Gateway is HP's first foray into the enterprise NAS space, which is currently only served by costly proprietary systems. HP's EFS Clustered Gateway allows customers to consolidate and virtualize all their existing NAS storage and efficiently manage their file serving needs at one-half to one-third the cost of existing solutions.

By bringing high-availability, standards-based solutions into the market, coupled with core bundled mission-critical services, HP is helping to drive down prices and improve performance.

HP StorageWorks EFS WAN Accelerators address performance issues affecting WANs by removing repetitive traffic and dramatically reducing latency effects, delivering up to a 20-fold increase of effective bandwidth and up to a 100-fold increase in throughput for file, email and web applications.

By partnering with the industry's best, HP EFS WAN Accelerators create local-area network-like performance across distributed environments, enabling customers to provide fast remote site access to centralized - and more easily controlled and protected - information and tools, while avoiding costly WAN upgrades and branch office backup headaches.

The HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System reduces backup bottlenecks and simplifies storage area network data protection. It integrates virtually seamlessly into existing backup applications and scales in both capacity and performance while improving overall reliability at the lowest cost per MB/s of any product in its class.

Integration with HP StorageWorks Command View Tape Library Software allows customers to manage all HP enterprise tape libraries and virtual library systems from a "single pane of glass" and enables set up and configuration of new virtual libraries in minutes.

Strengthening HP's competitive position

The new HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays and a comprehensive upgrade of EVA software and applications deliver the lowest disk array total cost of ownership in the industry, higher performance, significant capacity improvements (from 35 terabytes to 70 terabytes) and a reliable platform for data replication in businesses of all sizes.

The new HP StorageWorks Enterprise Modular Library E-series is a scalable, entry-level enterprise tape library (holding from 103 to more than 440 cartridges) that makes data protection and recovery simple and transparent. It incorporates HP's Extended Tape Library Architecture and is covered by comprehensive Enterprise Backup Solutions compatibility testing. Pairing the EML tape library with the new HP StorageWorks EVA products delivers significant improvement over competitive offerings.

HP StorageWorks Fast Recovery Solution (FRS) 2003 adds fast recovery of Exchange Server 2003 databases running on Windows® Server 2003 Enterprise or Data Center Editions and delivers the ability to recover databases in minutes rather than hours. Its easy-to-understand graphical user interface also has the functionality to recover individual databases while other databases are still online.

The HP StorageWorks ILM Services Framework - the industry's first complete set of multi-vendor consulting, support and management services - allows an information environment to be tailored exactly to customer needs and at an optimized price. The first ILM services introduced within the framework include:

• ILM Discovery Workshop - Builds bridges between business and IT to deliver the maximum value from ILM solutions. Also provides case studies and solution examples and facilitates consensus-building between business and IT leaders on ILM directions;



• ILM Data and Information Discovery - Helps identify data types through a detailed audit of the existing storage and data environment to determine their business uses and value;



• ILM Business Requirements Analysis - Establishes a comprehensive understanding of business needs and requirements in developing an ILM solution to help customers better understand and determine their business, functional, technical and implementation needs;



• ILM Business Value Analysis - Assesses financial impact through use of return on investment tools with industry values and customer-specific parameters;



• ILM Solution Architecture Blueprint - Determines the architecture of the solution, analyzes the feasibility, documents all essential design elements and then plans the implementation;



• ILM Policy Definition - Creates a set of data archival and retrieval policies to help address various regulatory, litigation, liability, operational, business and end-user needs. The new policies are mapped to specific regulations and industry best practices as indicated by the customer and then documented for implementation;



• Legacy Data Load - Helps complete the labor-intensive operation of migrating historical information to an effective ILM environment.

Enhancements and upgrades to storage products across the HP portfolio include:

• HP StorageWorks XP12000/1024/128 Disk Arrays - deliver higher availability for mission-critical IT environments;



• HP StorageWorks XP Data Shredder - reduces cost and betters compliance by securely freeing up array disk space;



• HP ProLiant Storage Server iSCSI Feature Pack - adds application storage services to file and print service on HP StorageWorks NAS products;



• HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share - provides 100 times more Linux cluster bandwidth;⁽²⁾



• HP StorageWorks Business Copy EVA - delivers cost-effective, easy-to-use and efficient local replication by providing point-in-time copy functionality for HP StorageWorks arrays;



• HP StorageWorks Command View EVA - utilizes EVA virtualization technology for complete array management;



• HP StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA - a controller-based application that performs real-time replication between HP StorageWorks arrays;



• HP StorageWorks Secure Path - multi-path, high-availability software that manages and maintains continuous data access to HP storage systems.

Enhanced partner solutions include:

• Validated EVA performance with Oracle® Database 10g



• Veritas DMP



• Qlogic Failover Driver v9

More information about the announcements above is available in an online press kit at http://www.hp.com/go/HPASC2005media. More information about HP StorageWorks offerings is available at http://www.hp.com/go/storageworks.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $81.8 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

⁽¹⁾ "IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, Q4 2004 Release," "Worldwide Optical Automation 2004-2008 Forecast and Analysis," "Worldwide Branded Tape 1Q04-4Q04 Vendor Analysis," "Worldwide Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter 2004-2008 Forecast Update: Difficult Transitions Behind, Strong Sales Ahead," "Worldwide Fibre Channel Switch 2004-2008 Forecast Update: November 2004," "Worldwide Storage Services Market 2005-2009 Forecast;" "Worldwide Storage Software Quarterly Tracker, Q4 2004 Release."

⁽²⁾ HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share delivers up to 100 times more bandwidth when compared to Network File System, the current de-facto standard for sharing files across a network.

Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corp., Redwood City, Calif.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the development, performance and market acceptance of products and services and other risks that are described from time to time in HP's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to HP's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended Jan. 31, 2005, and other reports filed after HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2004. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.